For the Intel486 and Pentium processors, the LOCK# signal is always asserted on the bus during a LOCK operation, even if the area of memory being locked is cached in the processor.

For the P6 and more recent processor families, if the area of memory being locked during a LOCK operation is cached in the processor that is performing the LOCK operation as write-back memory and is completely contained in a cache line, the processor may not assert the LOCK# signal on the bus. Instead, it will modify the memory location internally and allow it’s cache coherency mechanism to ensure that the operation is carried out atomically. This operation is called “cache locking.” The cache coherency mechanism automatically prevents two or more processors that have cached the same area of memory from simultaneously modifying data in that area.

When operating in an MP system, IA-32 processors (beginning with the Intel486 processor) and Intel 64 processors have the ability to snoop other processor’s accesses to system memory and to their internal caches. They use this snooping ability to keep their internal caches consistent both with system memory and with the caches in other processors on the bus. For example, in the Pentium and P6 family processors, if through snooping one processor detects that another processor intends to write to a memory location that it currently has cached in shared state, the snooping processor will invalidate its cache line forcing it to perform a cache line fill the next time it accesses the same memory location.

Beginning with the P6 family processors, if a processor detects (through snooping) that another processor is trying to access a memory location that it has modified in its cache, but has not yet written back to system memory, the
snooping processor will signal the other processor (by means of the HITM# signal) that the cache line is held in modified state and will preform an implicit write-back of the modified data. The implicit write-back is transferred
directly to the initial requesting processor and snooped by the memory controller to assure that system memory has been updated. Here, the processor with the valid data may pass the data to the other processors without actually
writing it to system memory; however, it is the responsibility of the memory controller to snoop this operation and update memory.